Tag Archives: Common Law Trademark Infringement

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Plaintiff is one of the largest electric power companies in North America and owns 167 trademark registrations including its “NextEra” mark. Defendant recently began to market, manufacture, import, distribute, license and/or sell energy products and services—including wind turbine components, solar panels, lithium batteries, and integrated new energy systems – under the name Nextra.

Defendants are accused of having repeatedly copied Plaintiff’s advertising marketing and branding including copying the design of Plaintiff’s showroom and jewelry boxes, interfering with Plaintiff’s exclusive vendor contracts, and copying and/or plagiarizing several of Plaintiff’s taglines and written advertisements.

This trademark dispute involves Plaintiff’s JOIN® trademark and Defendant’s JOIN.ME® trademark. Both marks are registered with the USPTO and used in connection with virtual meeting/video conferencing services. The trademarks have been used concurrently since July 2010.

Since as least as early as June 2000, Plaintiff, based in Auburn, Indiana, has continuously used the RIEKE PACKAGING SYSTEMS® trademark in connection with Plaintiff’s dispensing systems and closures. Around 2012, Defendant began using the RIEKES PACKAGING CORPORATION name in connection with glass bottles, plastic bottles, plastic closures, caps, metalclosures, dispensing closures and systems. Plaintiff has brought this lawsuit seeking damages and injunctive relief.

This is a dispute between two electronic cigarette distributors over the marks “Genie,” Liquid Genie” and “Electric Genie.” Both parties began using their respective trademarks in 2013 and have retail locations approximately six miles apart. This case was removed from the Circuit Court for Floyd County, Indiana.

Plaintiff, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, has used the ACCU-CHEK trademark in connection with medical instruments and apparatus related to blood-glucose monitoring and diabetes management and education since as early as 1981. In March 2014, Defendant changed its company name to CHEK Diagnostics and began to promote a line of diabetes care products. Plaintiff maintains that the CHEK mark is confusingly similar to its ACCU-CHEK trademarks.

Plaintiff is a custom guitar-maker from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He has sold his high-quality guitars under the registered STRATOTONE trademark since 2007.

Plaintiff’s high-end guitars are “painstakingly hand-crafted from the wood of a customer’s choosing and features vintage hardware and pick-ups.” They generally retail for above $1,250. Defendant has allegedly flooded the market with lower quality, cheaper (between $200-400) guitars that bear the STRATOTONE Mark. Plaintiff discovered the infringing products at a NAMM show in 2010, where he confronted Defendant’s personnel.

Defendant, based in Illinois, attempted to file its own trademark application for STRATOTONE in December 2012 but was rejected based on Plaintiff’s registration. In response, Defendant has attempted to cancel Plaintiff’s registration and Plaintiff has brought this lawsuit.

Plaintiff alleges that Defendant is manufacturing and selling unauthorized “Energy Dome Hats,” the headwear popularized by American New Wave band DEVO.

Plaintiff claims to be the exclusive licensing agent of DEVO’s intellectual property rights. The Complaint references a pair of federal trademark registrations for DEVO in connection with “entertainment services” and “sound and visual recordings.” The ultimate question for this case however, which is less clear in the Complaint, is whether DEVO owns the rights to manufacture and sell Energy Dome Hats, which are “red in color, circular, and including four tiers of the circular design, with each tier becoming larger in circumference from the top of the hat to the bottom of the hat.”